A story of undisplayable chars.

[european bob]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 21:28, Mike Zornek wrote:
> I was browsing my website today when I noticed an entry that had two of
> those square characters (that generally mean an undisplayable character) 

Undisplayable by your font, of course - doesn't mean it's an invalid
character per se... ;)

> Offending text is here:
> 
> http://mikezornek.com/temp/bad_char_web_input.txt

You have two \x000e's before "the Option", in case people can't see it.

> (Does Markdown throw warnings at all? Can I turn on a debug mode?)

Separate thread ;) Look under 'new link syntax'.

> Maybe I am thinking I deleted them, but I didn't and
> Perl caused this? I'm not sure .. But wanted to post the strangeness to the
> list.

It's not especially strangeness. Your document had the characters, so
they came out in the wash, unless I've misunderstood you. Certainly not
a Perl problem anyway.

I would guess the real culprit would be a crappy text entry form in
Safari. Another potential problem would be your site itself - do you
know what character set the document it is in (otherwise, the character
set the server delivers the document as)?

I wouldn't be quick to call it bad output, though, although it certainly
is odd. Because 15 (0xe) is less than 27, technically it's an ASCII
control code you have in your document. While that's highly unlikely to
be useful in a web environment, I'm not sure that Markdown can actually
do anything useful unless it knows precisely what character set you're
in (if you don't know the character set, it's just a load of bytes, you
can't sensibly interpret it). I don't know how Safari deals with that
kind of thing.

--bob.